People say that Lightroom and Photoshop don’t make a good job of converting Fuji raw files. Also, the colour conversions in Lr and Ps are not the famed Fuji ones, but Adobe’s best guess at them.

A few months ago Fuji made available a piece of software which allowed you to reprocess your raw files using the camera software. I have started to experiment with this because it is a way of getting an ideal raw conversion and colour simulation. You lose flexibility, but the trade off may be worth it.

1. The raws you are re-converting must have first been downloaded to your computer and picked up from there. The camera with which they were taken must be the one connected to your computer too.

2. The micro-B connectors are a bit fiddly. I looked at three before finding one which fit the 100F – there is one supplied with the camera but mine must have become muddled with the mass of others I had. The lead and connector is the one you use to chage a mobile phone but some seem too wide. The sockt on the XT2 looks completely different but the micro-B does fit into part of it – the whole socket is used by a USB3 lead, the 100F lead is a USB2.

Sounds a bit complex but these things did hold me up for a good hour (typical computer fiddle time!).

The actual time to re-process is quite short and the settings are the same as the camera offers for processing jpegs as you take the pictures in the first place. I have always taken raw+jpeg, but only to get a better preview after taking the picture – I routinely chuck the jpegs away once I hve uploaded the images from the camera. As a result I have not much idea of how the various setting affect the jpeg images – normally leaving everything “flat” – but I’ll now soon find out.

I anticipate that, for just a few images, where editing is going to be minimal, the process may be worth the time. I expect to carry on as normal, using Lightroom and just falling back on re-processing for those few pictures which warrant it.

Using a well lit image of Father Christmas (I had to promise not to say where I found him!) against a cerulean sky I have been able to compare a Lr processed raw file with an in camera processed one. The conversion by the camera is superior, with no “little worm” artifacts visible in the sky.

This is not surprising, the odd nature of the sensor in the Fuji camera is clearly something that you would expect Fuji themselves to have the key to.

The Fuji Studio gave me that chance to try the effects of sharpening and noise control on the quality of the image but I eventually decided to leave both on zero.

I hope to be able to post some images for comparison later and then consider the question; does it matter?

It is proving a little difficult to prepare truly scientific comparisons of detail from the camera jpegs and the Lr jpegs. There are numerous factors to standardise which are not really possible. For example, sharpening. Is zero sharpening in the camera really zero – hard to tell when the scale goes into negative figures.

Anyway the subjective view is that the nasty “worms” artefact which appears when you get Lr to do the coversion are not there in camera produced jpegs. I would say that if you are satisfied with colouration and do not intend to push and pull your image in Lr or Ps, use the jpeg out of camera, especially if you value the Fuji colour renditions which are only guessed at in Lr.

Reading this you may begin to be concerned about image quality in Fuji cameras but the overall image quality is very good and you only get a hint of the dreaded worms on very close inspection, far higher magnification than you need for a good print. It will show, however if you sharpen too much, when edges will gather round the “worms” and show them off in all their glory.

This screenshot does illustrate the “little worms” quite well. The sharpening setting here is quite gentle, but the area shown is tiny, you can just make it out in the navigation image on the left.

(The picture btw is one of my entries for this season’s portrait competition 😉